Month: July 2009

A couple of days ago I received an email about one of my articles that is on my site, well a series of them called customers suck. The email told me that “aside from the profanity” they enjoyed the articles. My thoughts on that teetered back and forth. I get a lot of positive and negative comments about my site, whether by email or comments on the blog or guestbook entries. One thing I don’t do is edit or delete them if I don’t agree or like them. For whatever reason, I throw my thoughts out there for everyone to see and I know that not everyone is going to agree with my thought patterns which is great as far as I’m concerned. However, I don’t ever recall someone telling me they like what I wrote but didn’t like the fact that I used profanity. It got me to start thinking about what is profanity anyway. I decided I would look it up online to make sure so I turned to a trusty dictionary. Not a paper dictionary, this is 2009 and even Merriam-Webster is online. Here is what I found out:

Main Entry: pro•fan•i•ty
Pronunciation:prō-ˈfa-nə-tē, prə-
1 a: the quality or state of being profane b: the use of profane language
2 a: profane language b: an utterance of profane language
Well that was rather helpful wasn’t it? Now I have to go reference profane.
Main Entry: pro•fane
Pronunciation:prō-ˈfān, prə-
1 : to treat (something sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt : desecrate
2 : to debase by a wrong, unworthy, or vulgar use

Well thank you online dictionary, now I know and knowing is half the battle. Ok then, profanity is profane language; well wait, that’s rather confusing isn’t it? You see, I never understood and still don’t understand why certain words are considered bad. It is one of those things that never made sense to me, someone heard a word and said; God doesn’t like that word. I’m guessing it was religion based at its earliest conception because most things that were considered bad were blamed on God to scare people into not doing them. In case this is the only thing you’ve ever read of mine, you should know I’m not scared to use so called “dirty words” but you should also know that I don’t always use them or even rely on them to make my point, however I do occasionally use them to exemplify points. In fact it may shock you that even I for whatever reasoning am not a huge fan of people cussing and swearing; but I think there are more profane things out there than words.

A good example would be this, which is more profane? You’re at the store and a woman and her 8 year old are shopping, the 8 year old drops a carton of eggs on the floor and instantly lets a cuss word fly out. Is that horrible, I don’t’ think so. If the child launches into a two minute tirade of words then yes, but one quick instinct word I don’t think would be profane or would stop the world from turning. Scenario two is much more profane in my eyes, and one as a former retail employee is one I’ve seen on many occasions. The same mom and her 8 year old are shopping and the 8 year old wants something and is told they can’t have it. Well this sets off the child and now they are, without using any swear words, telling their mother how stupid she is and how she doesn’t love them and basically belittling her in front of an entire store. That utter disrespect is what is profane to me.

That being said, I don’t want to hear your child swearing. Like I said, I swear my fair share but as a child I was disciplined and taught not to swear. So no, my argument isn’t that kids swearing isn’t profane, but that it isn’t the worst thing. Don’t get me wrong here; I don’t want Sesame Street being sponsored by the F word anytime in the future either. I also don’t want to hear newscasters swearing either; although these days I don’t think you could lessen the integrity of the news any further.

So what is profane? Anything that you don’t agree with or things that personally offend you. Is that a question or a statement? I’ll leave that up to the reader, as I have other things I need to do. One thing I think is profane is that a blog about what is profane didn’t contain any profanity.

Standup comedy is probably one of my favorite mediums, I have enjoyed watching and listening to standup since I was young, as I mentioned before I was introduced to George Carlin at a young age. I remember when I actually got to see George in all his glory on HBO back in the late 80’s and also got to see many other comics on HBO I was definitely hooked. I even used to watch Night at the Improv on the A&E network every Sunday night. Well that was many many years ago and now we live in the age of CD’s, DVD’s and digital downloads and I listen to a lot of comedy. Lately one of my favorites has been Jim Gaffigan. He’s got the everyman thing going for him, the “safe” topics and he doesn’t swear (anymore) in his performances, which opens up more mass appeal and sells to more audience members. Well on his last comedy performance he did like five to six minutes on bacon.

One part of the bacon bit was how we make other foods taste better by wrapping them in bacon. Now I do like bacon, but I usually just do regular bacon for breakfast and bacon bits if god forbid I eat a salad. Anyway, I’m at the store one day and I see the bacon wrapped steaks on sale and I think, well steak is good, bacon is good; I bet there’s something to this. So I buy my cheap version of filet mignon and the next day realize that it is excellent and the bacon adds so much to it. Well the next time I went to the store shopping I see something that blew my mind. Bacon wrapped pork.
I’m pretty sure that is one of the signs of the apocalypse. Who is the one thinking, hey, you know what would make this pork taste better? More pork wrapped around it. You’re probably asking yourself one thing; did you buy some? Of course I bought some, and let me tell you, bacon wrapped around a pork steak is great, like mixing breakfast and supper together. Maybe we could call it bupper, or seakfast… just throwing it out there. I do have to give props to the salesperson at the pork plant, they have earned every dollar of their commission.

In other news I’m moving, hopefully within the next two weeks. That will make me even less scarce for a short time in the online world. That’s ok though, I’ll be offline enjoying some bacon wrapped food.